Hi from the itty bitty titty committee. 🙋🏼♀️
I feel like the conversation of small breasts often gets overlooked in the body positivity space. It’s all about embracing your weight, your curves, but what if you’ve got no curves and especially no breasts?!
Why don't people ever talk about small breast and the shaming of flat-chested women? For years, I struggled with this. I felt less of a woman because of my small breasts. Unfeminine. Unsexy. Boyish. Not like a proper adult.
When my journey with binge eating started is hard to define, I think I had a distorted relationship with food as long as I can remember. I only understood I had an eating disorder when I started working with Stef back in 2016. Let me backtrack a few years and take you through my personal journey, I'll try to be as concise as possible but bear with me.
ver had a fight with your boyfriend, or a frustrating day at work, then end up cozying up with a nice cold pint of Ben & Jerry’s at the end of the day? Do you reach out for food to feel better even when you weren’t even hungry? Is your first impulse always to open the refrigerator whenever you’re stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored?
You may be an emotional eater. Meaning that you’re someone who uses food as a way to deal with feelings (typically negative ones) instead of to satisfy hunger. Instead of seeing food as what it is, i.e. something you consume for survival (like air and water), you misconstrue it into something else.
As I’ve touched on in previous posts, emotional eating is not a sin! When we become stressed, anxious, or worried, it’s only human to gravitate towards food to cope with our emotions. The problem arises when food is the only coping mechanism to dealing with emotions.
As most of you know, 2019 was a crazy year for Phil and I as he battled through some undiagnosed health issues. At one point, it got so bad that Phil wasn’t able to go to work anymore, let alone exercise or be part of any social activities. I distinctively remember one day in August where we tried to go for a short walk, and we had to turn around after 15 minutes because Phil was on the verge of fainting. It was the fist time that happened and we both went to sleep that night dumbfounded by the fact that we couldn’t even do the smallest of things anymore. Phil was left grappling with his new reality - a reality in which he went from healthy to unwell practically overnight and had no clue why. It affected e-v-e-r-y aspect of our lives, and it was one of the hardest things he’s every had to go through.
I wanted to touch base with you, hear to heart. This pandemic is real, it’s affecting all of us and is forcing us to completely change the way we live life. It essentially has flipped our worlds upside down. I hope that you, your family and loved ones are safe during this challenging time and that you have the support system around you to navigate these unprecedented (this is THE word of the year isn’t it?!) times.
The collective energy right now is that of fear, worry and anxiety. Uncertainty is always uncomfortable because we’re hard wired for safety and comfort. Whatever you’re feeling right now, just know - you’re not alone, you’re just human. And with the uncertainty and isolation this pandemic is bringing, many of us are looking to social media for some lightheartedness and coronavirus memes, and there’s truly some hilarious stuff out there.
It's been about a year since I completed my health coaching course through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and this post is long overdue. I'm often asked by others about my opinion of the course and if I think it's a good program.
The answer is....maybe.
Personally, I was absolutely wowed by the course. It was exactly what I was looking for and I loved every minute of it. It changed my life and has allowed me to create this beautiful passion-fuelled life I now live. It has helped me heal myself, connected me with like-minded individuals all around the world and has enabled me to inspire people to live their life to their fullest.
But whether IIN is a good choice for you, depends on YOU and what you’re after. Let’s have a closer look:
Diets don’t work.
Self loathing your body into change doesn’t work.
Using control and willpower to shape your body doesn’t work.
If it would work, it would have worked a long time ago.
And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing that deep down you already know this, but you are too scared to let go of the diet mentality. Because, how else are you supposed to know what to eat? So many of us are so out of touch with our body and so used to listening to external voices, they we don’t even know how to listen to our own bodies. I say F the diet in 2020, and instead I challenge yourself to the three small challenges I propose at the end of this video.
Much love, Stef xx
This blog post has been a long time coming. Where do I even begin?
I guess I need to go all the way back to the beginning of this year. As you know, we moved to Melbourne in March this year on very short notice, following some visa difficulties and my subsequent decision to pursue a masters in Marketing and Communications in Melbourne. I always knew that I wanted to do this master, but didn’t anticipate that 2019 would be the year. As it dawned on us that we only had two options - leave Australia for good or study - we decided that it didn’t make sense to wait another 2-3 years to do a master if it could help us stay in the country now. And so I applied for universities in late January, got accepted mid-February, quit my full-time job, had my last day at work on the 1st of March, moved to Melbourne and had my first day of uni two days later on the 4th of March. All in all, it was a 1½ months turnover. It was pure madness.
If you want a plant to grow, you have to water it. You have to tend to it, nourish the soil, give it the right amount of sunlight, protect it from the harsh winds, and give it love and energy every single day. Otherwise it will die. This principle applies to your relationships too. The more love, time and energy you invest in them, and the more consistent your efforts, the more your relationships will grow, open wider and go deeper.
Phil and I are coming up to almost eight years of relationship and
Have you ever found yourself in a place or a season of change that left you with more questions than answers? How do you navigate through the uncertainty when you just don’t know what the future holds?
I’m currently finding myself in this exact situation. While everyone else is busy chasing their new year resolutions and seems to have their 2019 plan of attack perfectly mapped out, my world has been turned upside down.
Long story short, but essentially Phil’s and my Australian visa runs out on the 15thof March and we don’t have a backup plan. Our initial hope was for me to get sponsored through my work, but that fell through as my current job in a brand entertainment/social agency isn’t relevant enough to my Bachelor studies. I found out the week before the Christmas holidays, and ever since I’ve been in literal panic mode. We have talked to and met with multiple lawyers, thought through every single option, drawn up pro and con lists for each scenario…
For about two years, I struggled with my inner daemons on my own.
That is, with my eating disorder, of course.
It was a debilitating feeling, knowing that no one else knew that side of me. I wanted to let someone in, but at the same time I couldn’t think of anything worse than someone finding out the truth.
When I finally found someone who I could confide in – and who didn’t seem to care in the slightest that I had “issues” – it changed the way I dealt with my problems. I finally let someone in. That person was Phil.
"I've been underweight, I've been chubby, I've been skinny fat, I've been super lean, I've been at the peak of my physical fitness and then lost it all again. All along this journey, I've hated my body, loathed it, accepted it, then loved it, then hated it again, wanted it to be skinnier, then stronger, fitter, more flexible, and the list goes on...
